by Lisa Pease
Before we continue with Wayne, let’s look a bit more closely at the other people who got away while Wayne was being apprehended.
Immediately after the shooting, Samuel Strain saw a five-foot-two or five-foot-three “Filipino” man in a blue turtleneck shirt with black hair and glasses carrying a “bulky package wrapped in blk [sic] paper.” As he came across the lobby from the direction of the pantry with “a black paper over his hand and arm and some type of object underneath,” the man said “Excuse” and pushed Strain aside and “walked away fast.”458 Strain thought the man was a male Filipino who looked like the suspect he had seen arrested on TV. To the FBI, Strain added that the man had a beard.459 Strain said the package he was carrying was “two feet long and six inches wide.”
Strain’s sighting was also supported by his friend Fred Parrott, who thought the man was 5’7” but confirmed there was a white male with a dark complexion who exited the hotel via the South exit.460 Parrott, a medical doctor, noted the man was “carrying a rolled up newspaper under his arm” and “appeared to have glassy eyes, as though he were ill.”461
As with many interviews that hint at additional suspects, Strain’s taped interview is absent from the record and the instruction “Do Not Type” (meaning do not transcribe the tape of his interview) is written on his interview summary in the thick pen of Lt. Manny Pena.462 On an FBI memo noting Parrot’s comments, someone hand-wrote, “w/m referred to above is Michael Wayne – he has been interviewed.” When I read these statements the first time, I didn’t pay attention to Strain’s description and believed this was Michael Wayne. It was only after I saw the pictures of Wayne and saw how Strain’s sightings of this separate man fit with that of other witnesses that I realized this could not be Michael Wayne. The man was too short, and Wayne did not have a beard. Wayne was not wearing a turtleneck either, but an open collar. Wayne had become the LAPD’s catchall, apparently, for any suspect that was not Sirhan.
Strain witnessed this man right after Dr. Marcus McBroom appeared to see the same man leave the pantry. McBroom saw someone furtively move past him in the pantry, carrying what the FBI recorded as a “notebook.” As McBroom exited the Embassy Room he ran into Strain, who told him, “My God—he ran right through our fingers.” McBroom assumed Strain was referring to the man McBroom had just seen hurrying away. McBroom initially assumed the man was a reporter.463
Years later, however, when interviewed by Greg Stone and Paul Schrade in March 1986, Dr. McBroom added additional information. After the shooting, he heard “the first one or two shots” and saw a woman in a polka dot dress run from the pantry yelling “we got him” or “we shot him.” McBroom added that “About this time the man with the gun under a newspaper ran out in a very menacing way.” McBroom, Strain and “the man running the ABC camera” all “drew back instinctively” when they “saw the gun, the barrel of the gun.” McBroom clarified the gun was not wrapped in a newspaper but just under it, with the newspaper tented at the fold over his arm. “He was ready to literally blast anyone who got in his way,” McBroom told them, adding that you could see the barrel clearly.
“I think we were in a state of disbelief,” McBroom said in answer to the unasked question of why they let him go without giving chase. McBroom explained he had gone from the euphoria of the California victory to seeing Kennedy shot to seeing Elizabeth Evans bleeding in front of him to seeing the woman in the polka dot dress and the man with the gun run out.464 The man getting away was wearing “a dark blue suit,” according to McBroom’s 1986 interview. Clayton, Strain, Parrott and McBroom all appeared to see the same man exiting quickly in a suspicious manner, Clayton saw something “that flashed” in his hand, suggesting metal, and Strain and McBroom thought the man had a gun that was partially covered by something the man was carrying. Due to his proximity to Michael Wayne and due to the fact that both had dark hair, it’s possible Patricia Nelson saw the gun butt sticking out of the shorter man’s poster roll, not Wayne’s.
Ernesto Alfredo Ruiz and Gilman Kraft both reported a tall, sandy-haired or blond man flying through the lobby, shoving people out of the way in a wild fashion. Did they see the same man?
Ernesto Alfredo Ruiz reported that just after midnight, he and his wife tried to get into the Embassy Room where Kennedy was speaking but, presumably seeing the crowd and security at the lobby entrance, decided to wait outside. They stopped at the “waterfall,” presumably the large fountain in the lobby. After a few minutes, Ruiz saw a six-foot-tall sandy-haired male, “late 20’s,” in a blue sport coat and a blue turtleneck shirt come flying out into the lobby with a five-foot-six female, 125 pounds, with “brownish” hair in a white dress with “drk. almost round markings on it.”
At first I thought Ruiz’s woman might have been Rosemary Kovack, who was wearing a white dress with small black squares that at a distance might have looked round, who ran out the Palm Court at the eastern end of the hotel and told people along the way that Kennedy had been shot. Kovack was with her 5’11”, blond-haired, 17-year-old son. Ruiz thought the woman was wearing glasses.
But Ruiz thought the male was older than the female. Rosemary Kovack’s age was not listed in her LAPD interview summary, but given that she had a 17-year-old son, she was probably in her late thirties, at least. The woman Ruiz saw looked 21 to 23, and the man she was with was in his late twenties. The summary of Ruiz’s interview says he saw the woman and man exit the east end of the hotel, but the map Ruiz drew indicates they ran out the south entrance. The Kovacks had left via the eastern entrance. So apparently, whoever Ruiz saw was not the Kovacks.
Ruiz said the man pushed several people out of his way and that both the man and woman had passed within 30 feet of him in the lobby. The man looked “pale and frightened” and the girl “yelled something” but Ruiz couldn’t understand what she said. He learned nearly immediately after they passed him that Kennedy had been shot.
Ruiz followed the police as they escorted Sirhan down the stairs to the west entrance (remember, both the first floor western-facing and second floor eastern-facing entrances were at street level as the ground was higher under the east end of the hotel). As he saw Sirhan being escorted away, Ruiz said the same man in the blue suit returned to where Sirhan was being apprehended and shouted, “let’s kill the bastard.” Ruiz added that this man “was the only one noticeably in favor of ‘getting’ the suspect.”465
As we saw in chapter six, Gilman Kraft had seen a 6’2” male in his twenties with “long blond hair” who “hurdled a couch” and pushed people hard as he “vaulted” over sofas “on his way out toward the back of the Ambassador Hotel—the South Side.” I think Ruiz and Kraft may have seen the same man.
Clayton appeared to be the only witness who saw both the man Kraft and Ruiz saw and the man McBroom and Strain saw. Clayton told Faura, “I noticed two youths were running down the hallway that parallels the Venetian Room out to the outdoor patio, and one of the two I recognized as being the tall one in the group” with Sirhan and the girl in the polka dot dress by the fountain.466
Olive de Facia may have encountered a witness to an escaping suspect. She had grown tired of waiting for Kennedy to come out and speak and had gotten into her car to leave the hotel. When she turned on the car radio and heard Kennedy had been shot, she went back into the hotel. There, she saw “a tall white, young man” speaking to a policeman. She thought he was about 19 years old. The young man seemed “quite hysterical was telling the policeman something about having chased a man out of the Embassy Room after the shooting and lost him.” As her FBI interview summary describes:
He began to cry and made a motion with his hands which De Facia interpreted to be a measurement or distance that he was trying to explain to the policeman. De Facia said it was her impression that the man was telling the policeman he had chased a man with a long gun out of the building.467
This man couldn’t have been Michael Wayne, as Wayne didn’t escape. Was this the same dark-haired man Strain and McBroo
m saw? The blond man Gilman Kraft and Ernesto Alfredo Ruiz saw? Or was this a fourth man, possibly the one a bystander told Joseph Klein had run out the east entrance, who had then “jumped the hedge outside the hotel” and disappeared into the night?468
In any case, Wayne hadn’t escaped. Was that part of the plan? After Wayne had been sitting in the hotel’s security office for an hour, “two plainclothesmen from the hotel” freed him from custody and took him instead to the witness room, the Gold Room. Neither these men nor their employer were identified, so we have to take Wayne’s word that these were plainclothed police officers. From there, according to his FBI report, Wayne “went into the next room, where the NBC television was, and ate some rolls, drank cokes, etc.” He was eventually transported to Rampart Station to give his statement. After he gave his statement to the LAPD, the FBI report notes, “he was driven home by them in the Los Angeles Police Department van.”
The astute FBI Special Agents Jerome K. Crowe and Roger J. “Frenchy” La Jeunesse added an interesting little comment at the end of their report on Wayne: “He gave no indication whatever that he was displeased with the fact that he had been detained at the hotel.”469 For someone who had been wild-eyed trying to get out and cried in captivity, that’s a compelling observation that calls into question Wayne’s real role at the Ambassador Hotel.
I don’t believe Michael Wayne was a shooter in the pantry. I believe it’s more likely his role was that of facilitator and distractor, helping the shooters get into the pantry with press badges, making sure people knew when Kennedy was coming through, and possibly making sure Sirhan was in position. It’s also possible, as we’ve already seen, that he brought a gun into the building and then helped a shooter get it back out of the building.
If Wayne were involved, on whose behalf was he acting? During one of his many interviews, Wayne mentioned shooting a gun with a friend at the Las Vegas Police Rifle Range some three to five years earlier. There are numerous Las Vegas connections to this this case, and while that could indicate to some the involvement of the Mafia, which certainly was active in Las Vegas, the Howard Hughes organization and the CIA (and at that time in Las Vegas, there was little distinction between those two) were also very active in Las Vegas. But it was an extreme right-wing connection that particularly interested the LAPD, if only because the connection demanded an explanation.
Wayne had a business card for Keith Gilbert on him at the time of his arrest. Keith Gilbert was a known militant, racist right-winger who was involved with the radical militia group who called themselves the Minutemen. And although the LAPD would work hard to disprove this, it seems clear that Gilbert apparently had Michael Wayne’s card as well. The connection set off alarm bells for Sergeant M. Nielsen, who found the Gilbert card in Wayne’s file and showed it to Lieutenant Manny Pena.470
In 1965, when Lieutenant Pena commanded the Foothill Detectives Division, 1,400 pounds of stolen dynamite were found in Keith Duane Gilbert’s apartment. Gilbert was a former gunshop owner, a right-wing militant and a self-described disciple of Adolf Hitler. He believed white people should have no contact with any other race and that mixed-race children were “not human.”471 Gilbert had been on the run, using a number of aliases to avoid capture, but he was eventually picked up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Ottawa, Canada, and Pena asked to have Gilbert extradited to his jurisdiction.
In a report on the Michael Wayne–Keith Gilbert association in the LAPD’s files, no mention is made of why Gilbert had the dynamite or what he planned to do with it. But the story was no secret and had been in the papers at the time: Gilbert had plotted to blow up the Palladium in Hollywood where Martin Luther King, Jr. was to speak to a number of Jewish leaders at a dinner to honor King.
After Nielsen showed Pena the card, Pena assigned Sergeants Dudley Varney and Manuel “Chick” Gutierrez to investigate. When Varney talked to Wayne in July 1968, Wayne did not deny having the card, but said he did not know who Gilbert was or how the card came into his possession.472
When William Gardner, the retired Los Angeles police officer who was the Ambassador’s security chief, was asked if he had seen the Gilbert card on Wayne at the time of his arrest, he said he had only examined Wayne’s wallet long enough to verify Wayne’s identity and had not noticed a Gilbert card.473
When Gilbert was questioned in San Quentin Prison April 1, 1969, about Wayne and shown pictures of Wayne, he did not recall Wayne’s face, but “he stated that he thought he had received the Michael Wayne card from someone at a gun show in Arizona in 1965 or earlier.”474
On April 10, 1969, after the trial was long over, Lt. Hernandez administered a polygraph to Michael Wayne. One of the lie detector questions proposed for Michael Wayne was: “Were you truthful when you stated you couldn’t remember where you obtained Gilbert’s business card?” But this question was never asked.
Naturally, Hernandez told us Wayne’s answers showed “no pattern of deception,” but the audio tape of the session tells a different story. You can hear the polygraph machine recording in the background. After a series of preliminary questions, Hernandez asked his official questions. “Mike, were you born in California?” Wayne answered “No” and the polygraph continued at its normal level.
“Other than Wayne, have you ever used a different last name?” Wayne responded “No,” but that was not entirely true, as he had gone by Wien. Perhaps that is why you can hear the polygraph making a bigger sound here, as if the needle is recording more stress on this answer.
“Did you come here intending to lie to any of my questions?” Hernandez asked. “No,” Wayne said, but the polygraph sound is even louder here. Perhaps knowing Wayne would react to this, Hernandez threw in an easy, meaningless question on his list that was not on the original list. “Do you own a dog?” Wayne said no and the polygraph machine quieted.
“Is there anything about the assassination of Senator Kennedy that you’re afraid to tell me about?” Wayne answered this and the next several questions “No,” but the sound of the polygraph grew louder again. So again, Hernandez asked a question of no consequence: “Are you married?”
The next question was the big one, and Wayne’s “No” response brought a lot of action from the polygraph machine. “Do you remember meeting Keith Gilbert?” The next question was asked differently from what Hernandez had written down. Hernandez had written, “Did you and Keith Gilbert know each other previously?” Instead, Hernandez asked, “Do you remember talking to Keith Gilbert?” Again, the polygraph sounded loud here, which is perhaps why Hernandez asked another question that was not on his list. “Did you lie to my last question?” The needle of the polygraph continued to be loud, as if swinging in a wide pattern.
Several other questions were asked, but the next one that drew a big reaction was “Do you remember ever giving one of your business cards to Keith Gilbert?” The needle appeared to swing widely here. Wayne explained he did have business cards in seventh grade. Perhaps that is the Wayne business card in the record, where Wayne spelled his last name Wien and gave an address that is not now in existence in Los Angeles (if it ever was).
The next answer that gets a big reaction is the “Yes” Wayne gave when asked if he was running after Kennedy was shot. At Hernandez’s next question, “When you were running inside the Ambassador Hotel, were you running to a phone booth to call for help,” Wayne answers “No” on the tape, and the polygraph machine needle can be heard swinging broadly. There is a great deal of distress with this answer. This is the answer recorded in print as “Yes” despite Wayne’s clear “No” on the tape.
The next two noticeably loud responses from the polygraph needle came at the question, “Have you ever used a different name than Michael Wayne?” and “In the last two years, have you attended a Minuteman meeting?”
As soon as the test was over, Wayne immediately brought up the “running for a phone booth” question. Wayne said that he wasn’t running for a phone booth, just a phone, hence his answer.
Hernandez, however, had a different question that bothered him. He told Wayne he needn’t have said “yes” to the question of whether he had been arrested because that was as a juvenile and he never spent time overnight in a jail cell. Wayne was still concerned about the phone booth question and brought it up again, but Hernandez couldn’t seem to care less about Wayne’s running from the scene of the crime.
Hernandez asked why Wayne had a reaction to attending a Minuteman meeting and a separate question Hernandez had asked about the Communist party and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Wayne made clear he was on the “other side of the fence from SDS.” Just before the end of the session, a door opened, then there was silence.
Hernandez probably went to confer with Sergeant Nielsen to ensure all the necessary points had been covered. Nielsen appeared to have been watching the session, as his write-up, not Hernandez’s, appears in the LAPD files on this date. At one point, Wayne claimed he had met another man who worked for Kennedy’s staff. Sergeant Nielsen noted in his write-up of Wayne’s lie detector session, “S.U.S. records reflect no such name.” Nielsen overlooked this obvious lie to conclude “Wayne’s responses… showed no pattern of deception.”475
Hernandez returned to the room to ask Wayne one last question. When he was stopped in the Ambassador Hotel, did he have a business card on him? But when Wayne started to answer, Hernandez interrupted him to clarify he meant Keith Gilbert’s card, and Wayne again denied knowing Gilbert.
With that, Hernandez was finished. Wayne asked how he’d done. Hernandez said he believed he had been truthful.
Then Wayne tried one more time to talk about running for the phone.
In the Daily Summary of Activities, Sgt. Nielsen, noted, “Wayne’s responses were satisfactory… and his answers showed no pattern of deception.” In the next paragraph, however, Nielsen notes that on the matter of the accusation that Wayne had Keith Gilbert’s card on him and Gilbert had Wayne’s, “[Wayne] claimed to have met another man named Michael Wayne who was a member of the Kennedy Staff” but adds “S.U.S. records reflect no such name.” In other words, Wayne appeared to have lied on at least one point. So maybe there was no “pattern” of deception, but provably, Wayne had lied successfully on his test.